Scale and the Political imaginary: A Situated Artistic Inquiry
Kerry Guinan
Ongoing
Human cognition is frequently described as being insufficiently equipped to apprehend large-scale phenomena, requiring mediating frameworks to render them intelligible. Contra to the “unimaginability” of large-scale phenomena, however, the construct of the ‘scalar imaginary’ foregrounds how scales such as the local, the global, and the planetary are not mere ontological givens, but constructed through imaginative and political practices that organise reality and distribute agency.
This research project asks how contemporary art practice might render sensible and imaginable “hyper-scale” entities, such as deep time, planetary processes, and high-speed, globalised infrastructures, whilst critically engaging with scalar theory. It examines the ways in which scalar constructs enlist assumptions of causality, agency and relationality, and seeks to interrogate such processes through the phenomenological experience of an art practice. Rather than treating scale as pre-given, the project considers scale as produced through sense and sense making, asking how perceptions of scale may be co-constitutive of political imaginaries. Central to the project is a situated approach, in which constructs of the “global” and the “planetary” are researched from within critical sites of geological and infrastructural significance.
The research is based in Kiruna, a mining city in the Swedish Arctic Circle, and the Karoo, a semi-desert region in South Africa. It also revisits prior PhD research, which was sited throughout multiple international supply chains and telecommunications networks, to examine how scale is already constructed in the artistic practice. Kiruna and Karoo are sites in which the scales of “the local” “the global” and “the planet” can overlap, dissolve, or reveal themselves to be abstractions. In Kiruna, the world’s largest iron ore mine is sited in the homelands of the indigenous Sámi people, a polar location disproportionally affected by climate change. The Karoo, a geologically significant, semi-desert region covering almost a third of South Africa, has been made more arid through colonial infrastructural projects, and is currently being prospected for fracking. In both sites, geological and infrastructural spatio-temporalities have a direct bearing on perceptions of political agency, shaping conditions of resistance.
The politics of scalar constructs are well theorised, particularly in geography, anthropology, and sociology (Brenner, Tsing, and Latour). Amid debates about the merit of retaining scale as an explanatory device within political analysis, social constructionists generatively foreground how scale is imagined, produced, and invoked through scalar imaginaries (Marston, Jones III, and Woodward). As Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have emphasised, such practices of constructing “large-scale” abstractions are inevitably produced within the immediate, situated, human-scale. A potentially productive line of inquiry, therefore, is to question how scalar imaginaries shape phenomenological encounters with specific landscapes and temporalities, and how modes of perception may be reconfigured to invoke alternative constructs of political agency.
Central to the project is the proposal that arts practice does not merely produce abstract representations of scale but actively organises the conditions through which scale becomes experiential. If scalar imaginaries and scale-as-experienced have a co-constitutive relationship, a political analysis of these dynamic processes may be undertaken through an experimental arts practice that reflexively develops scalar theory. Engaging this multidimensional character of scale through practice-based research, this project roots itself in situated research in Kiruna and the Karoo. It aims to contribute artistic methodologies to disentangle scalar complexity, alongside critical insights into how scale operates politically and perceptually within contemporary art and beyond.
References
Brenner, Neil. 2001. “The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar Structuration.” Progress in Human Geography 25 (4): 591–614.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599.
Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1996. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt 47 (4): 369–81.
Marston, Sallie A., John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward. 2005. “Human Geography without Scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (4): 416–32.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Associated Research Activity
‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Hyper-Scales’
A bi-monthly, transdisciplinary, online research seminar critically examining scalar constructs through theory and arts practice.
Research Outputs
‘A Tankwa Epoch’
Sculpture and Photographic Series
Tankwa Artscape, South Africa, April 2026
A Tankwa Epoch (2026). Photograph of reconstructed rock. Photo: Kerry Guinan
Kerry Guinan, A Tankwa Epoch (2026). Photographic work. Photo: Kerry Guinan.
This artwork was produced and presented in an art residency within the Tankwa Karoo, wherein the research examined human entanglements with geology from the stone-age era onwards. The artwork constructs a Latourian ‘geostory’ of the land through a reconstructed rock composed of geological grains collected from human-disturbed sites and an accompanying photographic series documenting these sites. These include sites bearing stone age tools, indigenous vernacular rock shelters of Khoisan peoples, colonial agricultural infrastructures, scrap from the film industry, a private airport, and environmental restorative projects. The photographs compose these human traces at extreme scales, alternatively foregrounding the artificial objects and the vast landscape. The rock, sized to fit within a human palm, compresses prolonged (and contested) human and geological histories into a single composite object, while attending to difference through sculptural processes of stratification and erosion.
Kerry Guinan, ‘Distance is a Measure of Closeness’ (2025). Photograph of the exhibition in Ormston House. Photo: Jed Niezgoda.
Kerry Guinan, The Red Thread (2022). Photograph of the artwork in Ormston House, Limerick. Photo: Jed Niezgoda.
This solo exhibition revisited a body of work produced over Guinan’s PhD, re-developing the production and installation of these works through a scalar lens. The exhibition was curatorially designed and framed as a critical exploration of the alienation inherent in ‘time-space compression’, a concept rooted in Marxist geography to describe capitalism’s tendency to increasingly collapse temporal and spatial barriers to globalised production.
The three artworks presented were documentation of The Red Thread (2022) a live installation of sewing machines in Dublin remotely controlled from a garment factory in India, large-scale prints of Landscapes (2018), two photographs juxtaposing the highest and lowest plots of land for sale in Ireland, and a new live edition of Portraits (2026), a series of still, video portraits performed remotely by sitters in Ukraine, Egypt, and Nepal.
Programme for Distance is a Measure of Closeness
‘Distance and the Distancing Effect: A Provisional Artistic Methodology to Render Distance Sensible’
Symposium Presentation
Nordic Summer University: Duplicity/Duplicität. Betwixt intimates and strangers, Berlin (January 2026)
Kerry Guinan, Portraits (2026). Photograph of the artwork in Ormston House. Photo: Jed Niezgoda.
This symposium presentation proposed an artistic methodology emergent in the exhibition ‘Distance is a Measure of Closeness,’ which rendered long-distance relations sensible through techniques associated with the Brechtian distancing effect. Enacted through digital and live networked technologies, the artworks, it was proposed, facilitated experiences of telepresence and Jacques Derrida’s telepoetics, transmitting affect across spatial distance, and suggesting co-presence, knowability and intimacy. Yet each work interrupted this apparent closeness by disclosing their own technical mediation, such that fundamental, geo-physical and social-cultural distances were made tangible, and attention was directed towards the audience’s own interpretative role in imaginatively constructing the remote subject.
Group Exhibition
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (May-September 2025)
Kerry Guinan, Artists (2019). Photograph of the artwork in IMMA. Photo: Ros Kavanagh
Dublin, Ireland
The exhibition of the artwork Artists (2019) in a group exhibition curatorially framed by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016). The work comprises a set of six blank art canvases, which have each been signed by a factory worker responsible for producing the canvases in the La Romana Free Trade Zone in the Dominican Republic. The British manufacturer of the canvases, Daler Rowney, is a popular supplier of art materials in Ireland.
Artistic Research Exhibition
Kuva/Tila, Helsinki, Finland (December 2025)
Kerry Guinan, Tangible Earth (2024). Photograph of the artwork in Kuva/Tila. Photo: Petri Summanen
The exhibition of the artwork Tangible Earth in the 2025 Artistic Research Pavillion ‘Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries’. Tangible Earth is a touch-based, interactive artwork. It takes the form of a rock on a plinth. The rock is heated internally, to the degree of the warmest inhabited surface temperature on Earth, and is conditioned by a heartbeat-like, haptic pulse, which reflects seismic data from the Earth’s crust.